Guides
The VMworld Hackathon I failed to attend… And how our team won – Part 3
While we had a great story and a good plan on how to make sure we achieved our goals during the hackathon, our team also met a problem where I was unable to attend the hackathon at the last minute because of a work situation.
This left our team with one fewer backend developer, making it harder for the rest.
So we shifted our plan slightly. The hackathon itself was during the evening of the first day of VMworld Europe. This left me with a day to develop a portion of the backend that would at least fulfill the requirement of Phase 1.
Phase 1 was where there was a tool that would manage the life and death of pods in Kubernetes according to Conway’s Game of Life rules.
Developing and documenting this during the day, meeting in the late afternoon with the team to give them a crash course in what I had done, allowed us to stay relatively on track, and would give the team a base to continue on during the hackathon itself.
This is a story in 3 parts:
- Part 1 – The team and the goal
- Part 2 – The story, the plan and the problem
- Part 3 – The implementation, the result and the future
The VMworld Hackathon I failed to attend… And how our team won – Part 1
As usual, during VMworld Europe in Barcelona, VMware organized another Hackathon for enthusiasts to work in a small teams and develop something impressive in a couple of hours. And as usual, I desperately wanted to participate, so I enrolled and decided to become part of a team called “ContainerQuest!”.
I wanted it desperately, because as my job becomes more and more demanding, i find myself having less and less time to work on side projects and code just for fun of learning something new. And i really wanted to pick that back up at this Hackathon.
Unusually, while i was enrolled in the team, I actually wasn’t able to attend (because of that demanding job roping me in).
More unusual, I still won… Or, to be more accurate, the team i was part of won, and were kind enough to still put my name in as a contributor, causing me to receive my price and some glory!
This is a story in 3 parts:
- Part 1 – The team and the goal
- Part 2 – The story, the plan and the problem
- Part 3 – The implementation, the result and the future
VMworld Europe Hackathon: Preparation
We are getting closer to VMworld Europe and the Hackathon that goes with it. For team Automation for All, this means we are getting prepared to have a lot of fun on Monday.
The goal of this post is to give an overview of the requirements of working with Ansible and how to properly setup your environment.
As a first tip, the best thing to do as preparation, is to look at all the available VMware focused standard modules in Ansible. A full list can be found here. The vsphere_ modules are being deprecated and should not be used.
VMworld Europe Hackathon: Introducing team Automation for All
In a week, VMworld Europe 2017 kicks off and as tradition dictates, VMware is organising a Hackathon on Monday night. As part of that, a bunch of us have started a team to do something cool with Ansible during that Hackathon (team 4 on the list).
The first and foremost goal of our team is to have fun and enjoy a good evening with like-minded people. If, during all of that fun, beer drinking, chocolate eating and overall banter, we also manage to build something interesting, all the better!
The team
The team consists of some interesting and experienced people with great backgrounds:
If you want to meet the team, join us on our VMware {code} Hackathon-Europe Slack channel!
The goal
There are two potential goals that we could go for as a team:
- Develop a new Ansible module to do something in a vSphere environment, for instance deploying an OVA.
- Creating Ansible roles to automate a deployment of a vSphere product, for instance vSphere Integrated Containers.
Let’s dive in each of those options a little deeper.
Govmomi and listening for vSphere events
For a while, i’ve wanted to get some experience in Go (or Golang, if you prefer), but never found the time. Recently I found the need for something that allows me to capture all the VM events on an ESXi host and handle according to them.
Next to pyVmomi, VMware also has a vSphere SDK for Go, called govmomi, and I thought that this was the perfect moment to dive into Go and get my hands dirty as i already know how to work with the pyVmomi library and the vSphere SDK/API.
Coming from a (basic) Python background and not being a real developer, moving to Go was quite an adjustment and after only one or two days of playing around with it, i still have to learn a lot.
However, i can compare govmomi vs pyVmomi and one thing is immediately clear about Go and govmomi: It is fast… Really fast. What normally would take a couple of seconds in pyVmomi, takes less than a second in govmomi.
To get started with Go, you can visit the Go Tour, it helps a lot to explain the basics of Go and the important aspects. However, as all developers know, the best way to get to know a programming language, is by using it. So let’s dive deeper in how govmomi works.
